The Fisher decision misses the point: Separate and unequal

A new Georgetown University report titled “Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Privilege” by Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl reinforces why the Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas misses the point. Recall that in Fisher v. the University of Texas, while the justices recognized the value of diversity in the higher education experience, universities and colleges must prove that no workable race-neutral alternatives could have produced the same diversity benefit. And strikingly, Justice Kennedy stated that in this process “the university receives no deference.” A reviewing court will be the arbiter of this determination.

The report by Carnevale and Strohl debunks the assumption that the United States has attained a level educational playing field in which consideration of race is no longer relevant. The study demonstrates that American higher education has two separate and unequal tracks: the 468 selective colleges and the 3250 open-access institutions. The divergence between these two tracks is increasing rather than diminishing. The authors identify two prominent themes that characterize these tracks: 1) racial stratification in the 4400 two- and four- year colleges analyzed for the study; and 2) polarization between the most selective schools and open-access schools. And from a student perspective, they conclude that “disadvantage is worst of all when race and class collide.”

Between 1995 and 2009, despite increases in the enrollment of African American and Hispanic students attending postsecondary institutions, more than 8 in 10 of new white students enrolled in the 468 most selective institutions, whereas more than 7 in 10 new Hispanic and African-American students have gone to open-access two and four-year colleges. White students account for 78 percent of the growth in the more selective institutions, while 92 percent of the growth in open-access institutions went to Hispanic and African-American students.

In addition, stratification by income is marked in more selective colleges, with high-income students overrepresented relative to population share by 45 percentage points and African-American and Hispanic students underrepresented relative to population share by 9 percentage points. This disadvantage is magnified by pre-existing geographic (spatial) isolation in the location of high schools as well as economic and educational deprivation in the pre-college years.

Why does this matter? The 468 most selective schools spend two to nearly five times more per student, have higher ratios of full- to part-time faculty, higher completion rates, and greater access to graduate schools, even when considering equally qualified students. Also, the college completion rate for the most selective schools is 82 percent, compared with 49 percent for open-access, two- and four-year institutions.

The report responds to two important questions. First, it provides substantive evidence that contradicts the “mismatch” theory which posits that minority students fare better in universities where the median test scores are nearer their own. In contrast, it reveals that Hispanic and African-American students benefit from attending selective institutions even when their test scores fall substantially below the averages at these schools, with a graduation rate of 73 percent from top colleges when compared to a graduation rate of 40 percent at open-access institutions.

Second, the report sheds light on the difficulty of substituting race-neutral alternatives such as class or to produce the same educational diversity benefit. The authors find that it would take more than five or six times the current level of class-based admissions to maintain the current racial mix in the most selective colleges. In fact, the pool of low-income white students far exceeds the pool of Hispanic and African-American students eligible for selective college admissions. The flood of low-income students that could result from using class as a proxy for disadvantage would create intense resource challenges for all but the most wealthy of selective institutions in the financial aid process. More selective institutions would also have difficulty to maintain current standards in the competition for students with higher test scores.

The report does not include an identical analysis for Asians and Native Americans due to data limitations. It does note that while 50 percent of new Asian enrollments have gone to the most selective schools, 30 percent have also gone to the open-access schools. In this regard, a 2005 College Board study reveals that Asian American/Pacific Islander students are evenly concentrated in two- and four-year institutions, with over half of the students in California and Nevada enrolled in community colleges. And a study produced by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute concludes that, like other minority students, AAPI students often struggle with poverty, with 47.4 of Asian American families classified as low income compared with 39.5 percent of the general population.

The challenge ahead for universities is to develop the statistical models that will satisfy the Supreme Court’s requirement to prove that alternative race-neutral alternatives are not sufficient for producing the educational benefits of diversity. In the evolution of the new criteria required to satisfy Fisher’s requirements, the Georgetown University report takes an important step in laying the groundwork for the evidentiary data and metrics needed.

Summing up the complexity of the court’s newly imposed requirements for justifying the consideration of race as one factor among others in college admissions, Thomas Kane and James Ryan point out in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that:

The court sometimes seems to labor under the belief that there is some magical combination of race-neutral proxies that will produce exactly the same group of students as in a class admitted under a race-conscious plan. Admissions officers know differently….

Comments

I think there exists a confusion between race and income. Whites have more accumulated wealth than African Americans and Hispanics, and can therefore afford those selective institutions such as Yale and Dartmouth.
In the 21st Century, we must look at the dynamics of why this is. I just finished reading a book on What Makes a Good Student. The author posits it’s not IQ, but rather 1.perseverence 2. self-control 3.intellectual curiosity and 4. familial support.
Within the African American community (please can we discuss this?) there has been a preponderance within the last 20 years of men getting their girl friends pregnant and then leaving. There are more single family African American women than any other race in America. And there are millions of African American young men without any guidance or fathers to encourage them to attend school, practice self-control or instill intellectual curiosity.
It’s a positive sign that any African American teenagers attend even a 2-year college or a 4-year college, even if it’s not in the “selective” group. A recent study illustrated that many African American children who graduate from high school are still functionally illiterate and can’t fill out a job application successfully. This is not society’s fault!
More teachers, nicer schools, a new football field is not a substitute for parental involvement. Without parental guidance, or a mentor that adopts a very personal attitude toward that child, he/she will not make the effort to apply himself to studies. More likely, it’s the neighborhood gangs of older boys who will “guide” him,,the ones shop-lifting, selling drugs, and slowly walking down the path to incarceration. Because nobody else will help this child!So these older boys are his only role model.
Society can’t legislate love and devotion to a child.
Can’t be done. How much can any society do? In school these children have access to sex education and yet continue to have babies at 15, 16, 17 years old. White teenagers use birth control. My daughter did. My son did. Because we insisted they do so. There was no judgment about the sexual activity itself (kids want to experiment with sex,,so what) but the birth control is essential. Why is no one explaining this to the African American community of adults who end up supporting 1. their daughter 2. their grand children 3. their grand children’s children.
Please stop ignoring the elephant in the room: dysfunctional African American families which are perpetuating the cycle of a myriad of ills in these communities including lack of higher education. Birth control for young men and women or (to young men) if you get a woman pregnant you are responsible for raising that child.
I guarantee, if more African American men took their familial responsibilities seriously, instead of merely showing people photos of “my kids” while they haven’t made ANY contact with the mother or child in months, maybe years, you’d see many more black children 1.finishing high school 2. attending college 3. attending these select institutions 4. raising responsible children themselves when they marry.